Under the Bridge

Sales Tracking: AppViz 3 and App Annie Advertising

Well, it’s been quite a while since we last made any note of developments on the sales tracking tool front … oh, wait, that’s because there really haven’t been any of note until this week. But then, there were two!

So what’s new? It would be easier to say what isn’t. In partnership with the Iconfactory, we’ve rethought, redesigned, and redeveloped AppViz, resulting in a more polished, elegant and powerful experience. The app was rewritten from the ground up, its code reviewed and optimized. In addition to a beautiful new interface, we focused on improving performance so that the new features and UI will scream on even modest hardware.

AppViz 3 is packed with powerful features we think you’ll love, from a Dashboard that gives you a bird’s eye view of your market performance, to the Financial module that can reconcile your bank statements with Apple’s financial reports and compute revenue splits with partners. Even our graphs have been redesigned, providing a greater level of detail and analysis…

That ‘Reconcile’, that’s the key. If there exists any other method to have that sorted for you, we don’t know of it. Good-bye, annoying spreadsheets!

Of course, if that isn’t a compelling feature for you, hey have a look at appFigures’ current feature set. We paid for it for a while to get the email reports, which caused us more headaches than they saved anyways because exchange rates are estimated (see ‘Reconcile’ above, did we mention we find that compelling?) but dropped it when App Annie started sending out sufficient enough emails to satisfy our reporting requirements; and if anything new and exciting has happened over there we’ve missed it, but check if you want and let us know if you find anything overly useful that AppViz is missing.

It all begins with 7 ad networks today, but over the coming months we’ll be aggressively adding more and more so you get the most comprehensive list of networks possible. Currently, you can connect to AdMob, Chartboost, iAd, Jumptap, Tapit, TapJoy and MDotM. If there’s a particular ad network or feature you would like to see added to Analytics next, email us at iwantthis@appannie.com and let us know.

So if you use any of those networks, hey it’s free. As is their basic tracking service, which might be all you need. As long, of course, you can live with the discrepancy problem noted above with appFigures:

Did we mention already that ‘Reconcile’, that there’s a killer feature we’ll happily pay for? Why yes, yes we think we did. And far as we know it’s only available in the new AppViz, and there aren’t any particular pain points we’ve noticed troubling us about sales tracking otherwise, so that pretty much narrows down our choice of service to no choice needed. With a mental note that if we ever get into the ad-pushing business on our own behalf, App Annie has a unique to our knowledge integrated offering there. But if any of you think I’m dismissing or have overlooked some important consideration in one’s sales tracking tools, be sure to let us know!